“ABI” compatibility is the contract between the kernel, and the user libraries and applications. FreeBSD preserves this across minor versions, so software built for FreeBSD 9.0 will run without modification on 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3. It’s not necessary to rebuild our applications just because the OS binaries have been bumped.

It’s worth noting (given the article’s general theme of stability/predictability) that this is a disadvantage of FreeBSD relative to the Linux kernel (which maintains ABI stability permanently, regardless of version numbering).

That aside – I’m not sure how much this may be attributable to the gin & tonic I’ve been consuming to dull the psychoemotional impact of the last ~6 days, but

As a FreeBSD user, I cannot disagree with the argument in here. I think that “boring” is entirely the wrong word. Perhaps the author is trying to ride the bandwagon of “boring” posts lately. It sounds to me more like he just wants his infra to work and Linux isn’t cutting it.

Speaking of how much time one spends debugging infrastructure, I’d say Apache Foundation projects represent a significant fraction of my debugging time.

Personally I do find this stuff exciting. ZFS makes me want to do upgrades every day, and while sending snapshots across the network I’m positively jumping for joy. The simplicity of CARP and network load balancing with haproxy gives me goosebumps. But for most of my colleagues they definitely want boring infrastructure, stuff that doesn’t wake them up at night, stuff that helps them ship apps, not the layers underneath it.